In the Land of the Sons of Liberty, Chewing Tobacco Has Been Banned

Boston banned smokeless tobacco at athletic fields, including Fenway Park, this past week, reports Breitbart.

Perhaps it is a passing restriction on liberty. Breitbart notes:

Before Boston banned Copenhagen, the locals banned kissing and Christmas. In 1634, the Great and General Court outlawed men wearing long hair in the colony. In 1656, the city fathers placed a Captain Kemble in the stocks for “lewd and unseemly behaviour.” His offense? Kissing his wife on his porch after a return from three years at sea. Three years later, the Puritan proto-Grinches proscribed Christmas.

Later Puritans sans the funny hats pulled Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, William Faulkner’s Mosquitoes, and Voltaire’s Candide from the shelves. The Sage of Baltimore found himself banned in Boston. On April 5, 1926, Watch and Ward Society agent Frank Chase gave H.L. Mencken a 50-cent piece, which he famously bit to verify its authenticity. Mencken gave Chase an issue of the American Mercury in exchange. Chase shouted on the Boston Common (site of earlier executions of Quakers, which the early settlers regarded as the Phillip Morris of religions) for the police to “Arrest this man!”